Product and service recommendations and reviews can be beneficial to people when making purchase decisions. Currently, sites such as CNET.com and Amazon.com are popular for the recommendation, rating and review content they have. Other popular sites, such as yelp.com and epinions.com are wholly dedicated to providing a place for people to review, rate and recommend product and services. However, consumers of these recommendations, ratings and reviews often don't know which recommendations, ratings or reviews to trust as they are authored or provided by anonymous or unknown individuals. Further, what is recommended for one person may not be applicable to another, and so consumers have a difficult time ascertaining if the recommended, rated or reviewed product or service is best for them, specifically. Finally, for many products or services (or classes thereof), there is little to no recommendation, rating or review content in the public domain.
Further, structured product and service information with explicit attribute detail that results from demand-driven collaboration between two or more parties can be beneficial in a variety of ways, such as when making purchase decisions. Currently, people sometimes use email to ask friends for input on a product or service, and through a series of “reply-alls” a conversation takes place—however, the information is unfortunately not at all structured or attribute driven, nor does it leverage the information already available in the public domain (email is simply subject & body). Wikis are also sometimes used for collaboration between two or more parties, but the structure of the information is amorphous (a significant amount of effort is required to structure a wiki to be attribute oriented, and even then, it can not intelligently access information in the public domain), and the information itself is “supply driven” in the sense that supply driven refers to information that is supplied for an incentive (e.g., money, reputation, the greater good, etc), not “demand driven” (e.g., in response to a request) Accordingly, neither email, nor a wiki nor any other tool currently in commercial production is the appropriate tool for two or more parties to use when making a product or service recommendation, or providing ratings and reviews, in a collaborative, structured way.
Also, people often will consult with friends, family, colleagues, and others for product or service information, but will do so in an un-collaborative way, such as through in-person conversations, phone conversations, or individual emails or text messages. In these cases, not every member of the conversation can see or respond to what other members are saying or suggesting. Further, these methods are inefficient and unstructured; no existing tool is built or optimized for this behavior.
Therefore, there exists a clear need for a demand-driven method to collect collaborative, structured, trusted, and personalized product and service information to, for example, aid people in making product and service purchase decisions.